A short history of the Limburg area

Long before the political division of Limburg in two provinces, there existed a Duchy of Limburg which overlapped only minimally with the current territories. Following the Congress of Vienna, an area which virtually coincided with the current Limburgs was allotted to the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, and called “Limburg” in remembrance of the earlier duchy. In 1830, however, the current kingdom of Belgium rose against its Netherlandic overlord. While initially, the Limburg territory sided with the insurgents and became part of Belgium, it was eventually split into the current constellation following the Treaty of London (1839).

In Netherlandic Limburg, coal was mined since the 12th century, but industrial extraction started only in the later 19th century (Heerlen/Kerkrade). In Belgian Limburg, coal was discovered in 1901, and large-scale exploitation started in 1917 (in Genk/Winterslag). Crucially, coal mining on either side of the border faced the same challenges and relied on similar solutions: the shortage of skilled laborers was resolved by migrant workers, mainly from Germany and Poland in Netherlandic Limburg, and from Italy, Turkey and the Maghreb countries in Belgian Limburg. This influx engendered multi-ethnic living estates for the workers (“cités” in Belgian and “kolonies” in Netherlandic Limburg), but on a larger scale it resulted in the high speed diversification of previously rural communities. Since then, a comparable socio-geographical distribution is noticeable on both sides of the border: in addition to a historical and traditionally prestigious capital (Maastricht vs. Hasselt), both provinces boast an ethnically diverse coalmining hub, viz. Heerlen (NL) and Genk (B).

The linguistic effects of the 1839-split are not well understood. There is a recognizable pan-Limburgian accent, and there is evidence for pan-Limburgian morpho-syntactic idiosyncracies (e.g., dative constructions like Ik kocht haar een dekbed; see Cornips 1998, Colleman 2010). On the other hand, the SAND (Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects) lists a host of phenomena which are restricted to only one of the Limburgs (constructions like Hij heeft zich het hemd gewassen are attested exclusively in Netherlandic Limburgian), and a number of rapid syntactic innovations such as Hun hebben have only percolated into the Netherlandic Limburg area. In the domain of the dialect lexicon, there is evidence for the diverging impact of the national border in the Limburg area (Huisman et al. 2021), and language attitudes also suggest divergence: Netherlandic Limburgians are more negative about Belgian Limburgian accents than vice versa, and only the Netherlandic standard accent (but not the Belgian) is deemed prestigious in both Limburgs (Steegs et al. 2008). The crucial question to be asked, in short, is to what extent a fairly recent state border affects language in this region. Does it impact the standard or also the dialects? And does it have access to the deepest core of a linguistic system, the grammar?

The parallel emergence and exploitation of coal in both of the Limburgs does not seem to encourage linguistic convergence, but rather divergence. From the onset, the mining vocabulary was entrenched in different languages, namely French and Italian in Belgian Limburg but German in Netherlandic Limburg. In the aftermath of the closure of the coalmines between the 1960s and 1980s, Genk was able to reassert itself as a Belgian “capital of cool” (building on its multi-ethnic composition), and linguistic features of Limburgian Citétaal (notably the palatalized pronunciation of sjtijl “style”) have since then diffused across the Flemish territory (see Grondelaers & Marzo 2023). No such diffusions have been documented from the Heerlen area, and Heerlen varieties of Dutch are not deemed cool: if anything, they are stigmatized as defective Limburgian (Hollesj mit knoebele – “Hollandish with bumps”; Cornips 1994).